Computer-based, annotated floor plans are becoming widely used, as building climate control, security and so forth are coming more and more under computer control. The annotations relate to delineations of rooms and the designation of fixtures or features of interest within the rooms. These floor plans may also be useful for building maintenance if plumbing and wiring connections are accurately designated.
New technologies, such as tracking systems currently under development, use annotated floor plans or maps to trace the movements of people, office machinery, automobiles and so forth, within buildings, garages or grounds. Such systems require accurate delineations of rooms, parking spaces or other areas of interest, in order to designate correctly the location of a tracked person or object.
The determination of the current location is, at best, as accurate as the annotations of the floor plan or map. If, for example, the delineations and designations on a floor plan are imprecise, the system may place a person in a particular room, when the person is actually in an adjacent room or in a nearby corridor.
One type of annotation system requires that a user enter the coordinates and dimensions of every room, specifying the locations of doors, windows and other fixtures and attributes of interest. The system assimilates the information and produces an annotated floor plan image. Such data entry is time consuming and tedious. Also, the results are often imprecise because of inaccuracies or inconsistencies of the data entry.
To reduce the amount of data entry, various systems incorporate drawing packages. These packages allow a user to trace the outlines of rooms, windows, doors and so forth, either free-hand or on a graphic representation of a floor plan, such as a scanned blueprint image. The system then determines, from these tracings, the coordinates and dimensions of the rooms and the locations of the outlined fixtures and attributes. The tracings must designate fully-bounded regions, otherwise the system cannot determine the dimensions. These drawing features reduce somewhat the time required for data entry, although they do not eliminate the tedious aspect of entering and manipulating data by hand. Further, they do not eliminate the inaccuracies and inconsistencies associated with the hand-entered data. Since the systems determine the room dimensions from the hand-traced regions, they incorporate any drawing inaccuracies into their floor plan annotations.
Certain systems allow users to select one of a number of predetermined shapes and direct the sizing and orientation of the shape using a mouse. The user may not, however, change the underlying shape. The user can thus select a rectangular shape and instruct the system to enlarge, shrink or rotate the shape. The user cannot, for example, direct the system to change the rectangular shape into a triangle. These user-guided shapes can be used to delineate regions which correspond to one of the predetermined shapes. They can not, however, be used to delineate other shapes, and are thus of limited usefulness. Similarly some systems use "filling" techniques to identify fully-bounded regions, but these filling techniques do not work with partially-bounded regions.